What makes brilliant people become concerned--to the point of paralysis--about simple common sense issues, just because they involve race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion or physical ability.

In science:

The most common pattern was for a larger tagset to give higher accuracy, but there were notable exceptions in French (where gender marking was the key factor), in Swedish unknown words (which show the reverse trend) and in English unknown words (which show no very clear trend at all).

Tagset Design and Inflected Languages

People who communicate are more likely to share common characteristics, including age, location, language, and they are less likely to be of the same gender.

Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network

Schnipke (1995) studied gender differences relative to effort; she found that rapid-guessing behavior was common among male examinees on an analytical test.